Our People: Biographies

Joe Bergantino is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. Bergantino has been a national and local investigative reporter for 35 years. He spent most of his career as the I-Team Reporter for WBZ-TV in Boston. He also did investigative reporting for WPLG-TV, the Washington Post-owned TV station in Miami and spent five years as a correspondent for ABC News where he reported for World News Tonight, Nightline and Good Morning America. During his career, Bergantino has won many of the broadcasting industry’s most prestigious awards including a duPont-Columbia Award and Citation, a Robert F. Kennedy Award for reporting on the disadvantaged, and a Gabriel Award. He has won several local Emmy awards including one designating him Best Investigative Reporter in New England. He was twice nominated for national Emmys for his work in 2002 and 2004. His stories have had a major impact on the lives of New Englanders and the results of his investigations have been felt worldwide. Bergantino is a clinical professor of journalism at Boston University and has taught journalism courses at Boston College since 1995.

Jenifer McKim is a Senior Investigative Reporter and Senior Trainer at The New England Center for Investigative Reporting. Her stories on child fatalities and the state Department of Children and Families were awarded a 2014 “Publick Occurrences” award from the New England Newspaper and Press Association. Before joining NECIR in September, 2013, McKim, worked as a social issues and business reporter at the Boston Globe, where she started in 2008. There she received a 2011 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism for a story on domestic sex trafficking of minors and a 2nd place nod for the 2013 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism chronicling a federal investigation into a global child pornography network. Prior to joining the Globe, McKim worked on the Investigative Team at the Orange County Register in California where she led a group of reporters to write about lead-tainted imported Mexican candies. The six-part series was a nominated finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. McKim is a 2008 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and a graduate of Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She started her journalism career at the San Juan Star in Puerto Rico and speaks fluent Spanish.

Beth Daley, a Senior Investigative Reporter and Senior Trainer at NECIR, joined the center in November 2013. Daley covered the environment, science and education for almost two decades at The Boston Globe and won numerous awards for her work including being named a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Among her many stories--a two-year investigation on mislabeled fish in Boston area restaurants that won three awards from the Society of Business Editors and Writers along with additional awards from the National Press Club, the Society for Features Journalism and the National Headliner competition. Daley spent the 2011-2012 academic year as a Knight fellow at Stanford University, a program designed to foster journalistic innovation and entrepreneurship. There, she became deeply interested in new journalism models and created EnviroFact, a collaborative clearinghouse to check environmental claims in the news. From 2001-2003, Daley was the Globe’s science and 9/11 reporter covering the anthrax scare, the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. space program. From 1997-2001, she was the newspaper’s education reporter. On that beat, she wrote a series of award-winning stories on shoddy school construction and covered urban education in Boston and across the nation. Prior to joining the Globe in 1994, Daley worked as a reporter for the Newburyport Daily News and as an English teacher in Sri Lanka and Thailand. She is a graduate of Northeastern University.

Clara Germani, NECIR's Managing Editor, is an award-winning editor and reporter who spent most of her 35-year newspaper career with The Christian Science Monitor, most recently as a senior editor managing in-depth projects – one of which was an investigative partnership with NECIR of the voluntary global carbon market that won an Overseas Press Club citation and a Sidney Award. Another project she edited about the mismanagement of a $60 million US foreign aid project in Afghanistan led to an FBI investigation. Three reporters covering conflict in Africa and the Middle East who worked under Germani nominated her for the Ochberg Society Mimi Award for sensitive editing of trauma stories and for compassionate care of her reporters – she won honorable mention in 2009. She also led multimedia projects on education, immigration and religion that won several national media awards. She headed the Monitor’s oped page for five years, and was a correspondent for the paper in Latin America, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. Germani also spent five years with The Baltimore Sun as assistant national editor and correspondent in Moscow, where she traveled extensively covering everything from indigenous reindeer herders in Arctic Siberia to the war in Chechnya. She has taught numerous writing and editing workshops as well as a journalism course at Emerson College.

Doug Struck has been a journalist for more than 30 years, covering six continents and 50 states as both a national and foreign correspondent for The Washington Post and, previously, The Baltimore Sun. He developed a specialty in global warming reporting at The Post, where he was a war correspondent, Nieman fellow and Pulitzer finalist. He now teaches as Journalist in Residence at Emerson College in Boston, and writes and produces for various outlets on a broad range of environmental issues. He has won a variety of awards.

Jillian Saftel is our Training Manager. Jill is a 2014 graduate of Northeastern University with experience in both strategic communications and journalism. Her past roles have included working as a sports correspondent at The Boston Globe and internships at the Red Sox Foundation and in public relations. After receiving her B.A. in Journalism from Northeastern, Jillian worked as an Account Coordinator at Version 2.0 Communications, a digital communications and public relations agency that specializes in fueling growth for companies and organizations. While at Northeastern, she received the Paul E. Hirshon Award for Academic Excellence & Professional Ethics. Jillian is originally from Rhode Island and her interests include journalism, sports and education.

Tom Fiedler is the Dean of the Boston University College of Communication (COM). He began his tenure on June 1, 2008 following a distinguished career in journalism. Tom joined the Miami Herald after graduating from COM and worked there for almost 30 years as an investigative reporter, a political columnist, the editorial page editor and finally, the executive editor, from 2001 to 2007.In 1987, after presidential hopeful Gary Hart told journalists asking about his suspected marital infedelity to follow him around, Fiedler and other Herald reporters took him up on the challenge and exposed Hart's campaign-ending affair with a Miami model. The next year, Fiedler received the Society of Professional journalists' top award for his coverage of the 1988 presidential election. Three years later, his investigative reporting on a religious cult, earned the Herald a Pulitzer Prize. The Herald's entire staff won another Pulitzer in 1993 for the paper's coverage of Hurricane Andrew. As the newspaper's executive editor, Fiedler was a stickler for journalism ethics, particularly after reporters working for the Herald's Spanish-language sister publication El Nuevo Herald, were found to be on the payroll of a U.S. government-owned anti-Castro news service in 2006. Fiedler also pushed his reporters and editors to embrace the Internet as a critical means of news delivery, rather than just an appendage of the newspaper. He also embraced new media as a visiting Murrow Lecturer and Goldsmith Fellow at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, where he investigated the impact of the Web on the presidential primary system and taught a graduate course on the intersection of media, politics and public policy. In addition, Fiedler co-directed a project, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation, exploring the future of journalism education. In 2003, Fiedler received the College of Communication's Distinguished Alumni Award and in 2005, the college presented him with the Hugo Shong Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism. In 2006, he was elected a member of BU's Board of Overseers.

Joshua Eaton is an independent journalist who covers religion and society, human rights and national security. Joshua now helps NECIR with digital production, ensuring that our investigations appear in a beautiful, compelling way. His writing has appeared in outlets that include the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Al Jazeera America, Salon and GlobalPost. He has also created data-rich, interactive online content for Al Jazeera America and Al Jazeera English. Before joining NECIR, Joshua was editor-in-chief and web editor at Spare Change News. He holds a master of divinity from Harvard University – where he focused on religion and society and Buddhist studies – and a bachelor of arts in psychology from the University of West Georgia.